Climate engineering, three generations in.

My grandfather started Halberd with one Chevrolet pickup truck and a Carrier dealership agreement in 1978. We did not anticipate that being his grandchildren's job. We are glad it became ours. — Eleanor Halberd, Co-CEO

The first generation

Charles Halberd · 1978

Charles Halberd apprenticed under a now-defunct Triangle mechanical firm in the late 1960s, after his service in the Navy and a brief detour through community-college coursework in electrical engineering. He spent eleven years installing and servicing residential systems for that firm before, in 1978, he leased a small storefront on Capital Boulevard, signed a Carrier dealership agreement, and bought a used 1973 Chevrolet C10 pickup. That truck is on display in the lobby of the Raleigh headquarters today.

The firm's first decade was almost entirely residential. Charles installed Carrier residential systems across what was then the suburbanizing edges of Raleigh — Cameron Park, Hayes Barton, and the early subdivisions of Cary. Through the 1980s, as Research Triangle Park grew from an industrial park into a thirty-thousand-employee technology corridor, Halberd took on its first commercial accounts: an office building near RTP, a small medical office on Capital Boulevard, a Lutheran church on the south side of Raleigh.

By 1990 the firm had grown to nine technicians and three trucks. Charles had handed engineering to his son Robert, who had earned a mechanical engineering degree at NC State and apprenticed under his father through the 1980s.

Engineering begins

The 1991 fabrication shop

Robert Halberd's decision, in 1991, to open an in-house duct fabrication shop was unusual at the time and remains so. Most regional HVAC firms outsource sheet-metal duct fabrication to a third-party shop in their region, which converts duct design into a series of phone calls between the engineer who sized the system, the shop who fabricated the metal, and the installer who hung it. Halberd's in-house shop allowed duct design to be part of the engineering process rather than an afterthought handed across the fence.

The shop opened with two journeyman sheet-metal workers and a single CNC plasma table. Today it employs five fabricators, two CNC tables, and an overhead crane, and supplies roughly seventy percent of the ductwork on Halberd's commercial and residential projects. The remaining thirty percent — runs that require sizes outside the shop's standard inventory — still come from a partner shop in Greensboro. The fab shop also serves a small number of other Triangle HVAC firms on a wholesale basis.

The next generation

Eleanor & Phillip · 2009

In 2009 Eleanor Halberd, then 41, returned to the firm after a fifteen-year career in finance and operations at a Raleigh consulting house, with an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler. Her brother Phillip, then 37, had earned his PE in mechanical engineering, taken the ASHRAE Distinguished Lecturer track, and worked five years as a staff engineer at a national engineering consultancy before joining the firm full-time in 2008. Robert Halberd, then 64, transitioned to a non-operational role over the next eighteen months. He continues to keep an office at the Raleigh HQ and serves as a senior advisor.

The 2009 transition coincided with the post-2008 recession, which was difficult for the regional HVAC sector. Halberd retained every technician through 2009 and 2010 by deferring profit distributions and accepting reduced margins on commercial bids. Eleanor's first operational decision was to formalize the maintenance program — what is now the Halberd Concierge Plan — which has grown from roughly four hundred contracts in 2009 to more than twenty-four hundred contracts today.

Eleanor and Phillip have repeatedly declined acquisition offers from Apex Service Partners, Service Champions, and one other national consolidator. The reasons have been consistent: the firm's employees, customers, and supplier relationships have been built over forty-six years on a regional, relationship-driven basis that does not survive private-equity rollup pressure.

Principles

What we will not do

Halberd will not subcontract emergency commercial calls to third-party referral mills. Every commercial dispatch is handled by a Halberd-employed technician who has been credentialed on the equipment installed.

Halberd will not use same-day-only pricing or limited-time-pressure closes. A Comfort Advisor quote is valid for ninety days from the date of issue. If the customer wants to think about it for ninety days, the firm is glad to wait.

Halberd will not accept commission incentives that reward over-sizing systems. The firm pays Comfort Advisors and engineers a salary plus a project-completion bonus indexed to customer satisfaction at the one-year mark — not at the close.

Halberd will not entertain a sale to a private-equity rollup. Charles, Robert, Eleanor, and Phillip have all received offers from Apex Service Partners, Service Champions, and others. The answer has consistently been no, and is the same answer now.

Who works here

The engineering staff

The Halberd staff is small for a firm of its revenue. Seventy-one employees across three branches. The roles below represent the senior staff and a representative cross-section of credentialed practitioners.

We are a regional firm by choice. The Research Triangle is where we live, where our employees live, and where most of the customers we installed for in the 1980s still live. We see them at the grocery store. We see their children growing up. We installed their parents' systems and now we install theirs. The phrase "family business" is overused, but in this case it is exact.

— Eleanor & Phillip Halberd, Co-CEOs